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The Pakistani-born actor (Silicon Valley) and comic’s love of the seasoned rice dish is such that his family calls him Kumail Biryani.

“I could literally eat my grandmother’s biryani for every single meal for the rest of my life and be thrilled every single time,” he tells The Sporkful podcast.

Nanjiani, 39, is having a moment with his movie The Big Sick, which he and wife Emily V. Gordon wrote to chronicle the rocky start of their relationship. The Star’s Peter Howell gave it four out of four stars.

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Nanjiani spoke to the food-focused Sporkful before the movie’s release. In it, he lays out how to find a good Pakistani restaurant.

“The lighting’s got to be terrible. It’s gotta have hospital lighting. It’s gotta have white fluorescent lights. That’s how you know the food’s going to be good,” he tells host Dan Pashman.

“Our restaurants were always super bright . . . When I see that lighting, I (know) these people are just about the food. They have made no concessions to the American palate.”

The interview left an impression on Pashman. “Before talking to Kumail, I wasn’t very familiar with (biryani). After talking with him, I ran to the nearest biryani cart to fill up,” the New York-based Pashman told me in an email.

Hungry for biryani, I set out with Nanjiani’s guidelines in mind.

At Bhaijaanz Grill in Mississauga, the lighting is an unfortunate mix of fluorescent tubes, halogen pots and orange fixtures.

The restaurant is going through a sizable renovation — a man hangs wallpaper during my visit — but remains open.

Two types of biryani are on the menu, lamb ($9.99) and chicken ($7.99). I order both. Fifteen minutes later, they are ready.

They look similar: Basmati grains in three colours — red, orange and yellow — with chopped cilantro on top and bony chunks of meat poking out like pocket squares from a suit jacket.

Both come with a small cup of raita, thin yogurt flavoured with onion and stained pale green by cilantro. The server sweetly mimes how to mix cooling raita into the spicy rice.

The taste of the two, though, is markedly different. For the lamb, the rice is cooked together with the meat, absorbing its juices. The rice for the chicken is cooked separately, making for a blander result.

A quick visual inspection reveals neither raisins nor nuts — a plus for Nanjiani — and numerous whole spices: peppercorns, star anise, bay leaves and the stem of a dried chili. The restaurant is coy about its seasoning, owning up to cumin, onion, ginger and garlic but dismissing further questions with a smile.

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